Perk Up, Jet-Setters! Here’s an App to Knock Out Jet Lag

As awesome as international travel can be, it's all too easy to get sidelined by jet lag (AKA when your body's internal clock is "misaligned" with the actual time of day). You know the feeling: It's 4 AM and all you want to do is rest up for a day of sightseeing in the morning, but you're wide awake -- and then you're dragging the next day. Not to mention the "jet lag" that happens to shift workers and other folks with unpredictable or night-owl schedules.

It turns out, beating jet lag is fundamentally a “math problem,” say researchers at the University of Michigan — getting the right amounts of darkness and light at the right times can actually reset your body clock, and there are a couple of incredibly precise ways to do it, taking into account your specific schedule and ability to be exposed to light.

Full disclosure: While this reporter can spend hours delving into jargony science studies, math is, how do you say, not my forté. And even if I COULD accurately explain the details, you’d probably be asleep by the time I finished explaining their new study anyway. (But for you mathletes out there, here’s a link to the full study!

So thank the Apple Store gods: These crafty researchers have taken the information from their study and turned it into an app, Entrain. It’s a free iOS app that works like this: You tell it your typical hours of light and darkness in your home time zone, then tell it where you’re going, when you’re getting there, and how much light you’ll likely be getting (so if you’re going for business and you’ll be holed up in a fluorescent-lit hotel conference room most of the time, you can let it know, versus heading for a sunny beach and basking in light all day). It’ll provide you with an ideal schedule for when to wake up, go to sleep, and get light exposure, and give you an estimate for when you can expect to adjust to the new time zone.

The really sweet part is that this math-backed program may actually reduce the time it takes for you to adjust to your new time zone, even more so than previous “re-entrainment” methods — other schedules take more than 7 days to completely adjust to a 12-hour time zone shift, and Entrain’s takes approximately 4 days.